In Part 1 I covered making the puddle by fusing several sheets of Bullseye COE 90 glass, but didn’t get into how that became finished cabochons.
In this part I will cover making the cabochons from the puddle, from breaking up the puddle, grinding on a glass grinder and preparation, full fusing and a final fire polish.
Continue reading Making Green Puddle Cabochons – Part 2 – The Cabochons
Time for a new fused glass puddle.
In our efforts to build up our stock of cabochons for our first craft market stall (I will post about this later), I decided to make some more striped puddle cabochons. Much like others I made some time ago, but with a green colour scheme.
A while ago I tried my first puddle cabochons, with mixed success. The puddle, though small, worked well, but I had a lot of devitrification when making the cabochons. A lot of time was spent at the glass grinder, grinding and cleaning off devitrification, reshaping the cabochons and fire polishing to get a better result. Some of those cabochons were reworked a few times before I was happy with the result.
It was a big learning experience but now I feel I have moved forward and have enough experience to get a much better and quicker result.
Continue reading Making Green Puddle Cabochons – Part 1 – The Puddle
Recently, I tried an offcut puddle. A stack of Bullseye 90 COE glass offcuts were piled up on a shelf and fused until they melted down in to a puddle. This worked quite well, but a few pieces of opalescent offcuts did show signs of devitrification.
In the same firing Ann made a bar of black and white using multiple stringers for decoration.
Out intention was always to then cut the puddle and bar up for cabochons. Well, I recently received a new diamond blade for my tile cutter and really wanted to give it a try, so cutting the puddle up was the perfect test.
Continue reading Offcut Puddle Cabochons Fire Polish
This was a milestone – my very first glass fuse firing.
What’s a glass puddle? Well, I didn’t have the faintest when I first heard the term. It is basically a technique for creating jewellery cabochons.
The idea is to layer up a number of pieces of art glass in complimenting colours, then full fuse that together into a puddle. The glass completely fuses down and melts together into what is literally a puddle of glass.
You then break that up, and that is a challenge, into small pieces, set them on edge and again fire to a full fuse. Other than deciding what colour glass to use and how to layer it up, there is not a lot of control over the final result. I suppose it was this that attracted me to the idea; the mystery of the final result.
Continue reading First Glass Fusing for a Puddle